Artist Statement

I create illustrations that explore everyday objects, spaces, and rituals of the gay experience. It began as an escape from my work as a concept designer in corporate entertainment, where I made plenty of work that bore little resemblance to my actual life as a gay man. “Is this all there is?” I kept thinking.

Embracing all that I am now, the work I make is pure personal expression. Shaped by three decades of questioning my own existence and observing the gays in their natural habitats, the pieces are mostly stories I want to tell and things I’ve been wanting to say. I used to suppress all that. It sounds cliché, but I believe the key to my work lies in the mundane, something I find endlessly amusing. The more I look, the more I see. The more answers I find, the more everything makes sense. I’m hooked.

Bio

It was the 90s, and growing up gay in the LA suburbs was nothing I’d want to repeat. Being 1st-generation Chinese American, I was handed two impossible life assignments: make the family proud, and don’t be gay. I failed both. Bullied from within and outside the home, I turned to art for solace.

After graduating from ArtCenter College of Design, I spent the next decade dreaming up fantasy worlds for the entertainment industry—lucrative, often thrilling work, but devoid of anything that resembled my actual life. In 2019, I sold my condo and left the industry to embark on a self-experiment: strip away all non-essentials and see what I’d make on my own terms. This time, without the golden handcuffs.